Research

What Keywords Are You Being Found For?

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You know, one of the strangest things about having a blog where you can write about anything is that you’re never sure how people find you. Whereas I specifically sculpt the types of search terms I want to be found for on my business blog and my finance blog, a blog of this type is really all over the place.


via Flickr

So imagine my surprise when I decided to take a look at the keywords that people have found this blog via search engines for over the last 4 months. This is freaky, but I’m going to share the numbers first. Let’s take a look:

January

Keyword Visits % Visits

1. (not provided) 735 21.81%
2. brendon burchard scam 607 18.01%
3. firefox vs chrome 187 5.55%
4. forcefield.exe 82 2.43%
5. sexting 45 1.34%
6. success 42 1.25%
7. girls sexting 32 0.95%
8. sexting girls 32 0.95%
9. sexting pics 20 0.59%
10. obsession with numbers 18 0.53%

February

Keyword Visits % Visits

1. (not provided) 453 17.60%
2. brendon burchard scam 137 5.32%
3. forcefield.exe 30 1.17%
4. girls sexting 27 1.05%
5. do they still make zima 24 0.93%
6. sexting girls 23 0.89%
7. firefox vs chrome 22 0.85%
8. image copyright laws 22 0.85%
9. sexting 20 0.78%
10. sexting pics 16 0.62%

March

Keyword Visits % Visits

1. (not provided) 588 24.13%
2. brendon burchard scam 188 7.71%
3. forcefield.exe 31 1.27%
4. sexting 23 0.94%
5. firefox vs chrome 20 0.82%
6. black social network 16 0.66%
7. image copyright laws 15 0.62%
8. sexting girls 15 0.62%
9. girls sexting 14 0.57%
10. do they still make zima 13 0.53%

April

Keyword Visits % Visits

1. (not provided) 510 29.01%
2. brendon burchard scam 59 3.36%
3. girls sexting 21 1.19%
4. sexting girls 21 1.19%
5. sexting 19 1.08%
6. “i’m just sharing” 16 0.91%
7. forcefield.exe 16 0.91%
8. image copyright laws 10 0.57%
9. how to write a rant 9 0.51%
10. favourite classical pieces 8 0.46%

Frankly, these are pretty shocking if you ask me. So you know, when it says “not provided” it means that the majority of terms searched didn’t make the top 10 otherwise.

So let’s take a look at the above. You see that #2 on every list is “brendon burchard scams”. I wrote an article last July titled Are Your Views On Money Holding You Back and I highlighted his book Millionaire Messenger in that post, and I mentioned the word “scam” referring to something else, not him. It’s strange how I wrote a positive post, never used what’s coming up as any type of keyword, yet it holds so much weight.

Next, let’s look at “forcefield.exe”. I wrote an article back in May 2010 titled Zone Alarm Issues You Should Know About and I mentioned that term only once in the article. I’m really stunned that it comes up so often in searches, as it was just something I mentioned in passing. I mean, if I was also being found for the term “zone alarm” I might think there was a valid relationship, but no. So strange…

Finally, all the terms about “sexting”; wow. I wrote another article in 2010 titled Should Sexting Be Illegal, nothing close to supporting what kids do so often, and that one article, the only one I’ve ever written on the subject, keeps people coming here on the search engines.

A couple of the search terms do make some sense though. I did write a post comparing Firefox vs Chrome, and my Black Web Friday series fits the black social network searches. I also had a guest post on image copyright rules and talked about the end of Zima (in 2008 no less), and wrote an article highlighting my favorite classical pieces (I didn’t know so many British folks were searching for it).

As I said, I have better control over my business account, and it shows as I mainly write about leadership there and the search terms overwhelming sending people there are related to that term, so I’m doing my job well. But here…

This is eye opening, but I’m not sure how much I can do. I do know this; I can hide that one post on sexting and within a few months that search term won’t be found anymore here. I know that because I removed my one post about cleavage and even though I’ve mentioned it a couple of times here and there, because it’s no longer a post (a post that was innocuous yet got Adsense banned on this site; talk about being duplicitous), I’m not found for that term anymore.

The lesson here is that you might need to check your analytics, see what terms your blog or website might be being found for, and determine if that’s the way you want to be found. Of course, if you have a niche blog you’re going to have a better chance of being found for your terms than I do. Yup, do as I say, not as I do! 😉
 

26 thoughts on “What Keywords Are You Being Found For?”

  1. I think most bloggers are in similar situation, but actually very big part of keywords that look odd and visits are hits from scraping search results with comment spamming software, also those have highest bounce rate for the same reason. Term “not provided” means few things – hits from Bing, “latest results”, other kind of search that is not passing keyword result through GA JavaScript tracking code, quite often if you check the number of visits from Bing, it will be the exact number as “not provided”, but I am not sure why.

      1. It is quite possible, Mitch. I also made an experiment and tried to compare GA stats with Bing Webmaster tools, close but not exact, unfortunately I can’t determine that in server log either.

  2. I have to be honest, I haven’t checked the analytics on my community site in a while. I do try to set up my posts by the topic of the particular post. I guess I need to put analytics on my things to do soon.

    1. Marcie, it helps to have some sort of source to see how things are going with your site. Analytics is free and let’s be honest, Google knows almost everything about us anyway, right? lol

  3. @Mitch,
    Allow me to make a correction here. The ‘Not Provided’ keyword is not those couldn’t make it to the top 10 or first page results. They are the consolidated set of keyword searches that Google is unwilling to provide information. This happens when a search user is logged on to Google (Google account, Chrome account, Google Plus, Gmail etc) and then search Google in the same active session (i.e before logging out or whenever auto login to Google services is on).

    Basically Google thinks that when the user is logged in, he wants to preserve his privacy/security that it doesn’t want to share what the user searched for.

    ‘Not provided’ doesn’t provide further details to us and hence bad for us 🙁 For me it’s as high as 45% these days and I just struggle to get actual keywords behind it.

    1. Thanks for the clarification Ajith; I couldn’t find anything specific on it so what I was thinking made sense to me. Then again, what you’re saying it means doesn’t make any sense either since I thought privacy was only to block who might be searching for stuff, not what people were searching for.

      1. Update on this one, actually Ajith is right to some certain extends, just found the official information. “Not provided” are results that are coming from “non branded” custom search related to Google AdSense which appear on websites and blogs.

  4. Wow! “sexting”?!?!? OK, I am not a native English speaker, but this is not a word that I’ve come across that often. You have a high quality content and a good PR, so that one post may have made that sort of fuss…still…wow.

  6. I’ve been totally surprised by your relevant keywords, I couldn’t picture myself how my stat would be like, I haven’t checked my analytics for a couple of months. Thanks for the inspiration, it’s time for me to take care about that.

  7. Hi Mitch,

    That’s very interesting. I used to see some very odd results too on my site, but I stopped looking. Now, I am only focusing on the most important keywords, the ones I am tracking on Google.

    What I discovered a while ago, was that it was a lot harder to be on the top of Google when I tried hard, than for random things that I never thought I would rank for 🙂

    1. It’s definitely hard Jens, especially for a blog but obviously some people get there. It’s always interesting to see the types of searches that get people to you and I often think that’s what helps Google decide how to rank you, which is why I’m bothered that a post I wrote so long ago seems to dominate in searches like it does.

  8. On this site I don’t really bother putting much effort into optimizing blog posts though I do on the product pages.

    Despite that its still v hard to do for some keywords – so hard in fact that I am almost at the stage of forgetting about search and using blogging communties, social networks etc for traffic

    1. Peter, I’ve always found that traffic for my blogs works best when I comment on other blogs. For static websites one can’t obviously do it as well, and that’s where I put my best optimizing efforts, supporting them with my blogs.

  9. Hey Mitch, I am being found some real keywords as well. I think people are searching for weird stuff and sometimes my titles look suspect. Great post.

  10. That is very interesting Mitch and I’m amazed at some of the search terms people are using to find my blog.

    What I would do in your situation is I would take advantage of those particular posts that are getting a lot of traffic by finding some sort of related product that may interest your readers. Who knows, you may score a sale or two?

    1. I remember your recommending such a thing on another post Sire,and I did just that very thing. Problem is that the average time for people staying on the post these days is less than 10 seconds, so I’m probably not going to reach any potential buyers anyway.

      1. So, what you need is something that will grab their attention so they stay a little longer.

        Anyway, speaking about keywords people use to find your blog, today I’ve had two people visit who used “bugs bunny kinky pic” to find me 😀

      3. OK, I just Googled it and it is still #1 in Google. The post is one of my Friday Funnies posts. You probably don’t remember it because you may not have seen it as you didn’t leave a comment 😉

        The excerpt from Googles search was…”Tagged with: humor • kinky photos • wise woman. Filed under: Friday Funnies ….. The feeling up Bugs Bunny pic is cute!” which shows that Google does take note of tags!

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